XPost: alt.religion.christianity, alt.christian.religion, alt.christnet.ethics   
   XPost: alt.religion, soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity   
      
   It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman,   
   but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.   
      
   BY   
   TOM HOLLAND   
      
   When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being   
   weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were   
   dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day,   
   I opened a children’s Bible and found an illustration on its first   
   page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old I may have   
   been, but of one thing – to my regret – I was rock-solid certain: no   
   human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to   
   care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and   
   bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been   
   brought to darken my Christian faith.   
      
   With time, it darkened further still. My obsession with dinosaurs –   
   glamorous, ­ferocious, extinct – evolved seamlessly into an obsession   
   with ancient empires. When I read the Bible, the focus of my   
   fascination was less the children of Israel or Jesus and his disciples   
   than their adversaries: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Romans. In a   
   similar manner, although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I   
   found Him infinitely less charismatic than my favourite Olympians:   
   Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. Rather than lay down laws and condemn other   
   deities as demons, they preferred to enjoy themselves. And if they   
   were vain, selfish and cruel, that only served to endow them with the   
   allure of rock stars.   
      
   By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers   
   of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their   
   interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had   
   ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity   
   was founded on the dusting down of long-forgotten classical values. My   
   childhood instinct to think of the biblical God as the po-faced enemy   
   of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had   
   ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the crusaders,   
   inquisitors and black-hatted puritans who had served as his acolytes.   
   Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. “Thou hast   
   conquered, O pale Galilean,” Swinburne wrote, echoing the apocryphal   
   lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. “The   
   world has grown grey from thy breath.” Instinctively, I agreed.   
      
   So, perhaps it was no surprise that I should have continued to cherish   
   classical antiquity as the period that most stirred and inspired me.   
   When I came to write my first work of history, Rubicon, I chose a   
   subject that had been particularly close to the hearts of the   
   philosophes: the age of Cicero. The theme of my second, Persian Fire,   
   was one that even in the 21st century was serving Hollywood, as it had   
   served Montaigne and Byron, as an archetype of the triumph of liberty   
   over despotism: the Persian invasions of Greece.   
      
   The years I spent writing these studies of the classical world –   
   living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of   
   the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who   
   had triumphed at Alesia – only confirmed me in my fascination: for   
   Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical   
   inquiry, did not cease to seem possessed of the qualities of an apex   
   predator. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always   
   done – like a tyrannosaur.   
      
   Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature   
   terrifying. The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical   
   antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values   
   of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of   
   eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by   
   night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of   
   Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a   
   million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came   
   to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak   
   might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of   
   the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most   
   of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to   
   me unsustainable.   
      
   “Every sensible man,” Voltaire wrote, “every honourable man, must hold   
   the Christian sect in horror.” Rather than acknowledge that his   
   ethical principles might owe anything to Christianity, he preferred to   
   derive them from a range of other sources – not just classical   
   literature, but Chinese philosophy and his own powers of reason. Yet   
   Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and ­oppressed, was marked more   
   enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit. His   
   defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not   
   unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least,   
   recognisably Christian.   
      
   “We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a   
   stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right.   
   Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held   
   assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The   
   notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was   
   so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical   
   narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how   
   completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the   
   role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order   
   by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.   
      
   Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that   
   were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp   
   of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It   
   is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in   
   post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to   
   suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that   
   every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have   
   learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly   
   and proudly Christian.   
      
   Tom Holland’s most recent book, “Dynasty: the Rise and Fall of the   
   House of Caesar”, is published by Abacus   
      
   Source:   
   https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2016/09/tom-holla   
   d-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity   
      
      
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